By the time Shore first appeared on television, she was already well known as a big-band singer and radio performer. In 1952, she was chosen most popular female vocalist by a Gallup poll. She was also appearing in the best nightclubs, making motion pictures, and selling approximately 2 million phonograph records per year. Shore’s subsequent two decades of television work merely enhanced her already remarkable career.

 Dinah Shore first appeared on television in 1951, when she began a twice a week program over the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This 15-minute show was broadcast on Tuesday and Thursday evening at 7:30. Jack Gould, the  New York Times radio and television critic, enthused about the program, “Last week on her initial appearance, she was the picture of naturalness and conducted her show with a disarming combination of authority and humility.”

The 15-minute program was produced by Alan Handley, who made special effort to make the musical production numbers interesting. The imaginative backdrop he provided for Shore’s songs or inspired by travel posters, New Yorker cartoons, history, literary classics, and Hollywood. Handley often checked department store window displays and went to the theater to get ideas for these numbers. On one occasion, he used a Georgia O'Keeffe painting of a bleached cattle skull as a backdrop for a song called “Cow Cow Boogie.” On another occasion, he made a living Alexander Calder-inspired mobile out of his vocal quintet “The Notables” by suspending them from the ceiling of the studio.

In 1956, Shore began a one-hour program on NBC, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show. The program was extremely popular, and the theme song, “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” always ending with Shore’s farewell kiss to the television audience, remains a television icon. The high production values of her 15-minute program continued on the 60-minute show. The lineup usually contained two or three guests drawn from the worlds of music, sports, and movies. Shore was able to make almost any performer feel comfortable and could bring together such unlikely pairings as Frank Sinatra and baseball star Dizzy Dean.

The Dinah Shore Chevy Show what's produced in Burbank, California, by Bob Banner, who also directed each episode. The choreographer was Tony Charmoli, who occasionally danced on camera. Often the production number took advantage of special visual effects. For “76 Trombones,” Banner used prisms mounted in front of the television cameras to turn 12 musicians into several dozen. The number was so popular that it was repeated on two subsequent occasions. For “Flim Flam Floo,” Banner used chromakey so that objects appeared and disappeared, and actors floated through the air without the aid of wires. In his review of the opening show of 1959, Gould called the program “a spirited and tuneful affair.” Shore, he wrote, “sang with the warmth and infectious style that are so distinctly her own,” and he judged that she “continues to be the best-dressed woman in television.”

Shore’s musical variety program went off the air in May 1963. After that time, she appeared in a number of specials and later did a series of interview shows in the 1970s. Including Dinah! Dinah and Friends, Dinah and Her New Best Friends, and Dinah’s Place. Throughout her career, Shore remained one of the great women of the entertainment world.